Elliott Sober Quotes About Evidence

Quotes about: Evidence

• If you have evidence that C1 is a cause of E, and no evidence as to whether C2 is also a cause of E, then C1 seems to be a better explanation of E than C1&C2 is, since C1 is more parsimonious. I call the version of Ockham's razor used here "the razor of silence." The better explanation of E is silent about C2; it does not deny that C2 was a cause. The problem changes if you consider two conjunctive hypotheses.

  Elliott Sober

  Two, Silence, Doe

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• It is an interesting fact about model selection that the evidence at hand can indicate that a model known to be false will be more predictively accurate than a model known to be true. This opens the door to a kind of instrumentalism.

  Elliott Sober

  Doors, Hands, Interesting

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• Darwin repeatedly used the hypothesis of common ancestry as a platform on which to build his various ideas about testing hypotheses concerning natural selection. He also argued that adaptive similarities provide little or no evidence for common ancestry. Although this second claim needs to be fine-tuned, Darwin was right that ample evidence for common ancestry can exist even if none of the characteristics we observe were caused to evolve by natural selection.

  Elliott Sober

  Ideas, Littles, Ancestry

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• From the fact that E is evidence for T and the fact that T entails M, it doesn't follow that E is evidence for M.

  Elliott Sober

  Facts, Evidence

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• The indispensability argument seeks to assimilate the epistemology of metaphysical statements to the epistemology of statements that are obviously empirical. I think it fails to achieve this goal. The argument does not refute the Carnapian thesis that scientific theories and metaphysical claims differ epistemologically - observations can provide evidence for the former, but not for the latter.

  Elliott Sober

  Thinking, Goal, Doe

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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